Ramapo College Information System

Detailed Course Information

Spring 2013
Mar 03,2015

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SOCI 345 - RACE, CRIME AND JUSTICE

This course involves an in-depth, comprehensive look at the relationship between race and crime in the United States. In disentangling the complex relationship between race and crime, this course examines both racialized ideological constructions and perceptions of crime, as well as institutional policies and practices, including seemingly race-neutral ones, that contribute to racially disparate outcomes both within and outside of the criminal justice system. Analysis of racialized perceptions and constructions of crime focuses not only on how such perceptions and constructions shape criminal justice practices and processes such as deployment, stops, arrests, detention, charges, convictions, sentencing, and incarceration, but also how they affect where people live and send their children to school. In investigating criminal justice outcomes, this course takes a critical look at a number of taken-for-granted assumptions in both conventional and scholarly explanations of race and crime. For instance, rather than assuming that there is a neat conceptual distinction between extra-legal variables such as race, ethnicity, class, and age, and legal variables such as the seriousness of offense and prior record, this course looks at how race shapes these extra-legal variables. Similarly, rather than assuming that racial steroetypes regarding criminality affect law enforcement practices in the same way across spaces and communities, this course looks at how a variety of community level variables result in different practices regardless of whatever pre-existing racial stereotypees harbored by law enforcement officers.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours